


Raised by Wolves

by raving_liberal



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Beth Greene Lives, Buried Alive, Gen, Post-Episode: s05e08 Coda (Walking Dead), Season/Series 05, good intentions wip fest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27113807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raving_liberal/pseuds/raving_liberal
Summary: Beth Greene wasn't quite dead when they buried her, and the Wolves find her.
Kudos: 7
Collections: Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	Raised by Wolves

**Author's Note:**

> Started and never continued this years ago and have been empowered by the [Good Intentions: WIP Fest](https://goodintentionswipfest.tumblr.com/) to share this piece of a fic and let it go. If you like the idea and want to write it, take it with my blessings!
> 
> Not beta-read.

People think of wolves as hunters, and they are, but they're not just that. Wolves are also scavengers. They eat what they find if they can't catch it themselves. They're resourceful. They're only as afraid of things as they've learned to be. Fear isn't innate. When there's nothing left but them to fear, they aren't afraid of anything. Not the dead: too slow, easy to smell from far away, easy to avoid. Not the living: too tired, worn down from the cost of making it in this world. Nothing to fear. Wolves take what they need, what they want, and what they want is everything.

What they wanted was her, so they took her.

***

She tastes dirt and iron, thick and foul in her mouth. She gags, spits, but she can't clear her throat. She either doesn't know how or can't make her body do what it needs to, so she keeps gagging and choking on the taste in her mouth, the gritty clay feel of it against her teeth. She's dead. She's dead and this is hell. Daddy was right about hell, wrong about God, because where is God, to leave her to this? Where is Daddy’s God?

Where is Daddy?

She tries to move her mouth, forcing it to shape a word, but whether the choked bleat that come out is meant to be "Daddy" or "God," even she couldn't say. Something presses against her face, covering her mouth and nose like a membrane, and on top of that membrane, something even heavier pushes down on her. Inside the membrane, she struggles against the weight. Her limbs feel strange and uncoordinated, like they belong to someone else. Maybe they do. 

She pushes, up, up, up, and the weight begins to yield. Her arms move like swimming—swimming? what is swimming? No, focus, focus—and her hands makes scoops, make shovels. She burrows up and up until the air kisses her face, warm and damp. It's dark still. She thought it would be lighter. Realizes it’s only dark on one side. Oh.

“Hello,” a soft voice says to her, from the side that’s dark. “You're lucky. This is a new world, and you don't have to struggle in it.”

She moves her mouth, pushes out with her weak hands, and forces out a sound. “No!”

“Ohhh,” the soft voice breathes. “Oh, you didn't die, did you? You lived.”

She tries to nod her confirmation. The voice—male? so gentle—says she’s alive. She is alive. This isn't hell. She’s alive.

“Somebody put you in the ground, but you lived, and I found you,” says the voice.

She nods again. Her head flops to the side, toward the voice, a figure suddenly coming into view on the not-dark side. He’s crouched there, watching her with curiosity, like one might watch a baby crawling towards a danger you might or might not decide to remove.

“I’m going to keep you,” he says.


End file.
